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Links between temperament and microstates in infancy
Dissertation

Links between temperament and microstates in infancy

Kara Lea Brown
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
07/2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000007929
pdf
Brown, Kara Lea Dissertation2.89 MB
Embargoed Access, Embargo ends: 10/13/2027 CC BY-NC-ND V4.0

Abstract

infancy microstates temperament Self-regulation
Temperament has been defined as individual constitutionally-based differences in self-regulation and reactivity that are impacted by maturation and environment (Rothbart & Derryberry, 1981). Temperament offers an integration of cognition and emotion through the lens of self-regulation (executive control, attentional abilities) and reactivity (tendency to experience emotion). Temperament has been examined through many different methods including questionnaires, observations, and electroencephalography (EEG), to name a few. Microstates are brief stable spatial topographies of underlying electrical activity in the brain measured with EEG. This methodology has been used in infant populations to explore global brain activity, both in a wakeful resting state (Brown & Gartstein, 2023) as well as in experimental tasks (e.g., Gui et al., 2021; Khazaei et al., 2021). There has been limited work examining microstates and their relationship with temperament; however, current literature has only examined the connection between temperament and microstates during resting tasks compared to parent-reported temperament of their infant (Brown & Gartstein, 2023). The current study will utilize a wakeful resting task in addition to laboratory tasks designed to elicit emotional responses to the tasks as well as relate to the broad domains of Rothbart’s theory of temperament: Negative Affectivity, Surgency/Positive Affect, and Regulatory Capacity/Orienting. The EEG microstate topographies and parameters will be compared across tasks as well as to parent-reported temperament attributes. It is hypothesized that microstates will be extracted from infant EEG data and able to provide replication of previous work (Brown & Gartstein, 2023). Additionally, it is hypothesized that these wakeful resting-state microstates will be differentially correlated with temperament attributes and subsequently be more likely to occur, with stronger activation, during tasks meant to elicit these specific temperament attributes.

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